Egyptian filmmaker Sara Shazli will be presenting her latest documentary, “Your Daughter,” during the Venice Production Bridge’s Final Cut workshop for films in post-production from Africa and the Arab world.
The director’s sophomore feature is a deeply personal story about her struggle to emerge from the long shadow cast by her mother, powerhouse producer and filmmaker Marianne Khoury, while also preparing to become a first-time mom.
It follows the 32-year-old filmmaker, who — obsessed with the idea of severing the umbilical cord that still connects her to her workhorse mother — moves out from her childhood home in downtown Cairo to live in a small house in the suburbs.
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While overseeing its construction, she remembers her childhood and the Ethiopian nanny who raised her, setting in motion an emotional journey to wrestle with the lingering pain of her mother’s absence from her life growing up.
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Shazli’s directorial debut, “Back Home,” which premiered at the El Gouna Film Festival in 2021, focused on her relationship with her father, a larger-than-life figure who’d been estranged from his daughter for many years. The film was largely shot in Shazli’s family home during the coronavirus lockdown in 2020, when the director returned from film school in Cuba to shoot her graduation short, after previously studying in Montreal.
It was during visits from Havana that Shazli finally felt ready to confront her mother with difficult questions about her childhood, when Khoury was largely a phantom presence in the household. “I pointed the camera at her. We were just hanging out in the kitchen. That’s when I started to ask her: ‘What happened? Were you really not there? Because I don’t remember you being there,’” Shazli told Variety.
The director described Khoury — the niece and longtime collaborator of late Egyptian screen legend Youssef Chahine, whose Misr International Films she runs to this day — as a “workaholic” who was more concerned with the day-to-day grind of the movie business than the task of raising her children.
That job was largely left to the family’s Ethiopian nanny, Woody, who the director said “filled the void [left by] my mother.” “Your Daughter” was originally conceived as a search for that nanny, who emigrated to Canada in 2004, but Shazli realized during development that “the real drama, the real conflict, is with my mother.”
Growing up among cinema royalty in Cairo led the director to develop a “love and hate relationship” with the film industry. Her mother’s physical absence partly owed to the location shoots and festivals and red-carpet premieres that went hand in hand with the professional life of a successful producer. But there was an emotional absence as well, a consequence of what Shazli described as “that need that [Khoury] had to film everything, to point the camera all the time.”
It was a compulsion that she recognized in other family members as well, a way of moving through the world like a series of flickering images on screen while avoiding the difficult emotional work that went on once the cameras stopped rolling. “This was the most important thing for them — capture everything, document everything,” Shazli said. “If you put the camera aside, that’s when you give real attention. That’s when you give real affection.”
“Your Daughter,” which is produced by Khoury and currently in post-production, makes use of the extensive archive of photos and home videos amassed by Shazli’s family through the years. Working alongside editor Nadia Ben Rachid, the longtime collaborator of Malian-Mauritanian auteur Abderrahmane Sissako (“Timbuktu”), she combines that archival material with contemporary footage, as well as fictional recreations of scenes from her childhood.
While she described it as a “privilege” to revisit the family archive while making “Your Daughter,” Shazli — who recently gave birth for the first time — has been equally determined to set her own course, both as a filmmaker and a mother. “With my daughter, I’m not obsessed with filming everything,” she said. “In fact, it’s the contrary. I want to put the camera aside and really be with her.”
The director added that the experience of having a child has finally allowed her to step out from Khoury’s shadow — to become a woman no longer defined solely by her relationship to her famous family.
“Having a baby, and becoming a mother, is also a way of cutting the umbilical cord. It’s like, ‘That’s done. I am done with being the daughter of my mother, in a way, and I’m ready to become that new person,’” she said. “That really helps to forget about your past.”
